Keir Starmer Abandons Principle for Populism on International Nurses Day

 

A Country That Forgets Its Principles Has Already Lost Them

By Sean Ash

On International Nurses Day, a day meant to honour the very people who keep our health system running, many of whom are migrants, Sir Keir Starmer chose to make a speech about tightening legal immigration. Not illegal. Legal. That distinction matters because it reveals more than just poor political timing, it reveals a complete moral collapse.

Roughly 30% of nurses and health visitors working in NHS England today are non-UK nationals. These are people who’ve followed every rule, crossed borders with courage, filled shortages in our crumbling health system, and, in many cases, held the hands of our dying when our own families could not. And on the very day we should be thanking them, the leader of the Labour Party decided to question their presence.

You couldn’t make it up.

We are now watching the official government not challenge the right-wing narrative on immigration, but try to outdo it. Starmer isn’t opposing harmful rhetoric, he’s embracing it. Pandering to populist sentiment for votes, bending his message to win headlines rather than hearts, and abandoning the very values his party was born to uphold, such as dignity, solidarity, and justice.

Where are the leaders of principle?

Where are the politicians who speak from lived experience, from empathy, from the desire to uplift rather than exclude?

Once, politics was a space for vision, for raising the nation toward a shared good. But today it is a competition to see who can bow fastest to fear. We no longer lead with ideals. We chase the approval of focus groups shaped by outrage and ignorance. And that ignorance is leading us backwards.

It was once said:

“First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.”

But in our day, it will be said:

First they came for trans people, and I did not speak out because I was not trans.

Then they came for the aged pensioners, and I did not speak out because I was not old.

Then they came for the disabled, and I did not speak out because I could still walk.

Then they came for the migrant, and I did not speak out because I was born here.

And then, when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.

That is the path we are on.

When politicians no longer speak truth to power but instead echo power to manipulate the people, democracy doesn’t just falter, it fractures. We begin to accept cruelty as pragmatism, silence as neutrality, and betrayal as compromise.

Sir Keir Starmer had a choice. He could have stood up for the principles that once defined his party and this country. He could have used International Nurses Day to reaffirm Britain’s gratitude to those who’ve come here to serve and heal. Instead, he chose to stir doubt, to court division, and to send a message to millions of decent, hard-working people: “You are useful, but not welcome.”

Shame on him.

And shame on all of us if we stay quiet.